An intersting desing.

Exactly!

Wow, this is really clear. It looks like your water companies keep waters clean instead of paying to their shareholders.

Nicely composed...

I stopped and made the photo because of him :)

You will make me buy a Nikon D8X0 :)

That really is a beauty. Wings frozen, a blast of yellow, and I love the way the ant is peering over, as if frustrated it doesn't have wings.

I particularly like the night shots in this set.

Perfect timing!

@Daneland - no government or industry is involved. It's all natural environment for hundreds of years or more...

Just fab b&w interpretation.

Like the levels and clarity. Excellent.

Very unique shot.

A Walk In The Woods

A belated entry from me this week, that's something a little bit different; a new Youtube video.

I haven't made a video since the "Pikestones" one that I put out on the Summer Solstice last year. Usually I end up with a really complex editing process and they can take up to a week to put together, but as this one contains neither music nor dialog, it was a much simpler production that was shot and edited in a single day (yesterday in fact).

As the title suggests, it's a walk in the woods, as simple as that. Just nine minutes of me walking through the woods and surrounding areas, although I've tried to take a woodland photographers approach to framing every shot, so in a way, it's as if I'm walking through a series of my pictures, kinda.

The walk is edited pretty much in chronological order, the most notable exception being the deer encounter which I've shoehorned in between a staged shot of me taking a picture of something and then moving on. In reality I met the deer a bit further down the path. Unfortunately the birds of prey were absent on this particular day, it would have been nice to have included them if any had been around.

In terms of production, it was mostly shot on a Panasonic Lumix S9, with the kit 20-60mm lens, ~plonked~ carefully positioned on a very lightweight tripod that I then had to walk away from and then back to again (or vice-versa). A variable ND was used to control light levels and maintain that important 180° shutter angle. I shot it in the 6K open gate mode, which I quite like as it gives me reframing possibilities and potential for a little bit of camera movement added afterwards in post, although I didn't actually apply any in this instance.

At the time of recording, I was using AF-S autofocus, expecting it to focus on the spot I'd selected at the beginning of the clip and stay there, just like every other autofocus video camera I've ever used. Unfortunately, I didn't realise that AF-S on the S9 doesn't work that way and will continue trying to follow focus on whatever you point it at, which is counter intuitive and is surely what AF-C is for? Anyway, the upshot of this is that there is occasionally a little bit of focus shimmer whenever I get in the way of the point I prefocused the camera on. I've subsequently worked out that I can enable "focus lock" (now mapped to the LUT button) at the start of a recording and it will hold focus as expected.

Only a pair of shots weren't recorded with the S9. The telephoto tracking shot of the deer was shot with the Z8 and the 100-400. I don't have another variable ND, but fortunately, the low light inside the woods meant one wasn't really needed for the aperture I was using (f/8). This tracking shot was taken handheld at roughly 300mm. I did an okay job of tracking the deer, but it wasn't perfectly smooth, fortunately a bit of additional stabilisation added in Davinci Resolve seems to have done a pretty good job of smoothing out the motion without having any serious impact on the IQ. Similarly, the static shot of the crow on a fencepost was also taken with the Z8, but this time at 400mm, so it's had a heavier amount of stabilisation applied in Resolve as I'm seemingly not as steady as I used to be.

All the clips were shot in the respective log profiles, so it's all been graded clip by clip in Davinci Resolve for a (hopefully) reasonably consistent look, basically using a very simple node tree to tweak the look of the log footage and then convert back to REC-709. This looks okay, but I have been doing some further research and experimentation today using a pair of colour space conversion nodes to bookend the rest of the nodes and this does appear to give better results, but I only found this out once I'd uploaded to Youtube, so you'll have to wait for the next video to see what that looks like.

Here's a link to the video...

youtu.be/-TzyCHXLins?si=POiqWo82pBOLjdTr

...don't forget to like and subscribe as they say in Youtubeland.

Thanks for the video, it has nice colours and viewpoints. A soft background music would make it better and I’d suggest walking towards the camera instead of away.

I enjoyed this. You're a born storyteller. If it were me (which it's not - I've never got into video 😁) I would include a few closer-up shots to break it up a bit. Things like grasses waving, backlit fern, rowan berries.

Thanks for watching.

If you've watched any of my other videos, you'll see that they're typically tightly cut to music, but in this instance I wanted to try something different and use only the ambient sounds from the walk for the soundtrack; birds in the background, the wind in the trees and so on to see how that worked out.

Unfortunately, this also included heavy breathing when I'm operating the camera (which I dubbed out with some generic background sound from elsewhere), my surprisingly noisy shorts swooshing whenever I walk and very irritatingly, someone having flying lessons directly overhead. Ah, the sounds of the countryside!

Another reason for not using music is licensing. I have about 20 short tracks that I've bought licences for over the years, cover me for Youtube use amongst other things. Annoyingly, whenever I use any of them in a Youtube video, they immediately get picked up as copyrighted music by the content ID system and I have to then go through the hassle of disputing that I have the rights to use them. There doesn't seem to be a good way to whitelist my channel for them, so I have to do it manually and often end up waiting a full month before the dispute expires. The same tracks on the same channel, over and over again. It's a really broken system.

Point taken about walking towards the camera. I do actually do that in several shots, although there's definitely a lot more scenes where I'm walking away.

One side effect of filming these things on your own is that for every shot of me walking away from the camera, there's another shot of me walking towards it when I return to pick it up (and vice-versa), so maybe I should edit all of those in reverse order and switch the bias?

Thanks for that.

Yes, a few close up shots of ferns and grasses moving in the wind would definitely add to it. I think the reason there's nothing like that here is that it's not something I tend to be drawn to when I'm out and about. If you think about the sorts of pictures I usually post on here, for the most part they're either wide vistas or tree studies, it's rare that I'll post a close up of some grasses or a bit of moss, although these can be fascinating when you get up close to them, but I either fail to see them or, when I do, I'm disappointed with how I've composed them, so it's definitely something I need to work on.

It did cross my mind when I was editing it that some of the clumps of ferns on the woodland floor would look great in close up, but by that point I was back home and it was too late. I'll try and make a conscious effort to record some filler detail shots like that on the next one. The odd stream would be quite nice too, but I can't think of any around that particular woods. Also something to consider for the next one.